American Pluralism Research Articles

Horace M. Kallen in the Heartland: The Midwestern Roots of American Pluralism by Michael C. Steiner (review)

Horace M. Kallen in the Heartland: The Midwestern Roots of American Pluralism by Michael C. Steiner (review)

Introduction: A New Angle on Midwestern History

IntroductionA New Angle on Midwestern History Jon K. Lauck In a 1966 interview, Bob Dylan said "I'm not a New Yorker. I'm North Dakota-Minnesota-Midwestern. I'm that color. I speak that way. I'm from someplace called the Iron Range. My brains and feeling have come from there." Dylan was the son of Abe and Beatrice Zimmerman, both products of Jewish immigrant families. The Zimmermans lived up on Minnesota's northern mining range in the town of Hibbing, where Abe sold appliances with his brother. Beatrice, known as "Beatty," recalled having served latkes to all her Christian neighbors on Hanukah and embraced her identity "as an American … who went to school and enjoyed every one of my Christian friends." She sent young Bob off to college at the University of Minnesota, where he found his purpose as a musician.1 The story of the Jews of Minnesota's Iron Range, including the Zimmermans, is told in this issue by Marilyn Chiat, who is an architectural historian and codirector of the Houses of Worship Project at the University of Minnesota. Our cover features the B'nai Abraham Museum and Cultural Center, formerly B'nai Abraham Synagogue, in Virginia, Minnesota, which is discussed in Chiat's article. Chiat's treatment of Iron Range Jews is part of a special symposium in this issue of Middle West Review focused on the history of midwestern Jewry. We seek to expand the scope of the story of ethnic immigration to the Midwest with this issue and seek to add to what we already know from prominent books about the immigration of Norwegians, Germans, and Poles to the region.2 Erin Faigin of the University of Wisconsin explains how Jewish immigrants to Chicago built a world of reading and debating and a lively community discourse. More specifically, they gathered in places like Ceshinsky's Bookstore in Humboldt Park and read venerable Yiddish works and translations of American classics such as Uncle Tom's Cabin. They explored their new place in the world by reading books published at Ceshinsky's such as Antologie Mitvest-Mayrev, a collection of writings about Detroit, Milwaukee, Chicago, and points west. They contributed, therefore, [End Page xi] to a midwestern regionalism that blossomed during the 1930s and did so from an interior point of view, not one from New York, whose gaze tends to dominate the historiography. As Jessica Kirzane of the University of Chicago explains, Jewish writers brought a fresh set of eyes to happenings in the Midwest. They could see the Midwest differently, as their shock at the famed Chicago stockyards makes clear. Their viewpoint, Kirzane argues, "offers a striking example of what is to be gained by studying Yiddish engagements with the American Midwest." Another important engagement took place in Cleveland, where, as Sean Martin explains, Jewish civic leaders built a monument to interethnic cooperation in the form of the Cleveland Cultural Gardens. Martin, a curator of Jewish history at the Western Reserve Historical Society in Cleveland, connects this effort to the theory of American pluralism devised by Horace Kallen, who developed his idea while living in and experiencing the ethnic diversity of Wisconsin.3 Martin sees the Gardens as a successful "enactment of the theory of cultural pluralism." Although much social and cultural cooperation and ethnic blending can be found on the Iron Range and in Chicago and Cleveland, evidence of the ancient problem of anti-Semitism can also be found. Carey McWilliams, for example, the long-time editor of The Nation, famously characterized Minneapolis as the "capital of anti-Semitism in the United States." In her contribution to our symposium, Laura Weber, most recently the editor of the journal Minnesota History, seeks to demythologize and contextualize McWilliams's claim. Weber explains Hubert Humphrey's efforts to combat anti-Semitism as mayor of Minneapolis, highlights Twin Citiesbased Jewish leaders' responses to McWilliams's article, and suggests a nuanced reading of McWilliams's later conclusion that anti-Semitism in Minneapolis was "not precisely duplicated elsewhere in the Midwest." The claims of McWilliams, the consideration of the evidence by Weber, and the comparative work of the other scholars assembled in this issue suggest even more...

Horace M. Kallen in the Heartland: The Midwestern Roots of American Pluralism

The philosopher and social thinker Horace M. Kallen (1882–1974) is rightly known for coining the term and promoting the concept of cultural pluralism, the intellectual progenitor of multiculturalism created in the first part of the twentieth century to push back against the idea that Anglo-American culture should be normative in the United States and the assimilationist “melting pot” ideal. Kallen, who grew up in Boston after immigrating from Silesia, spent many decades at the New School for Social Research in New York City, which he helped found. Michael C. Steiner is the first historian to consider Kallen's eight years in the Midwest—as an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin—not as a deviation from the northeastern norm of his upbringing, education, and long maturity but instead as a pivotal time of ferment and generation. Steiner argues for the importance of the Midwest as a region in Kallen's development and...

Review: Muslim American City: Gender and Religion in Metro Detroit, by Alisa Perkins

Book Review| February 01 2022 Review: Muslim American City: Gender and Religion in Metro Detroit, by Alisa Perkins Muslim American City: Gender and Religion in Metro Detroit. By Alisa Perkins. New York University Press, 2020. 264 pages. $89.00 hardcover; $30.00 softcover; ebook available. Kristin M. Peterson Kristin M. Peterson Boston College Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Nova Religio (2022) 25 (3): 136–137. https://doi.org/10.1525/nr.2022.25.3.136 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Kristin M. Peterson; Review: Muslim American City: Gender and Religion in Metro Detroit, by Alisa Perkins. Nova Religio 1 February 2022; 25 (3): 136–137. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/nr.2022.25.3.136 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentNova Religio Search Muslim American City from Alisa Perkins focuses on how Muslims in Hamtramck, Michigan create boundaries to determine how they will live out their faith in the religiously diverse but secular-liberal context of the United States. This urban ethnography takes on a distinct religious context: a small city surrounded by Detroit with a diverse mix of White Polish Catholics; African American Muslims and Protestants; and Bangladeshi, Yemeni, and Bosnian Muslims. The city has the largest concentration of Muslim residents (40 percent) of any city in the United States. By engaging with theories around space, group identity, and boundary formation, Perkins asserts that these religious and ethnic minorities “expand the boundaries of American pluralism from its margins” (9). In particular, these Muslims challenge the secular-liberal ideals of religious pluralism and the distinction of public/private spaces. Perkins’ ten years of ethnographic work in Hamtramck along with her fluency in Arabic allow her to... You do not currently have access to this content.

Horace M. Kallen in the Heartland: The Midwestern Roots of American Pluralism

Review of: Horace M. Kallen in the Heartland: The Midwestern Roots of American Pluralism, by Michael C. Steiner.

Horace Kallen in the Heartland: The Midwestern Roots of American Pluralism by Michael C. Steiner

Reviewed by: Horace Kallen in the Heartland: The Midwestern Roots of American Pluralism by Michael C. Steiner Jeanne Abrams (bio) Horace Kallen in the Heartland: The Midwestern Roots of American Pluralism. By Michael C. Steiner. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2020. xi + 240 pp. German-born and Harvard-educated American Jewish philosopher Horace Meyer Kallen is best known for introducing the influential concept of cultural pluralism in the early decades of the twentieth century, and it is a theory which continues to resonate to this day. Kallen maintained that diverse immigrants and minority groups cultivated their own social spaces and that they interacted to create an inclusive, ever-changing American overarching culture. In Horace Kallen in the Heartland, Michael C. Steiner, a professor emeritus of American Studies at California State, argues persuasively that the seven, often restless, years that Kallen spent in the Midwest, a "matrix of cultural pluralism," played a pivotal, although often overlooked role in the development and maturation of his thought on the subject (2). In fact, Steiner maintains that Kallen's sojourn in the Midwest (1911–1918), including his visits to Chicago and his stint at the University of Wisconsin, "ensured that Kallen's sweeping theory reached full expression" in that region (73). Steiner asserts that it was there that the crucial finishing touches were added and that Kallen's essential message contained a clear warning against the "forces of uniformity and tyranny" (2). Steiner clearly admires what he refers to as the expansive vision reflected in the work of Kallen and the other thought leaders he interacted with who came into his intellectual orbit during his time in the Midwest. [End Page 310] He observes that they "forged a generous open-ended vision of diversity in the face of rising white racism and vicious war hysteria" and notes that Kallen often urged his own University of Wisconsin students to "embrace their ethnic heritage" (3, 107). At first, Kallen bemoaned his life in Wisconsin in what he considered a backwater compared to the East Coast, particularly Boston, where he grew up. However, he soon grew to appreciate the Midwest "region's intellectual vitality and urban and rural diversity," and his time there included some of the most productive years in terms of his writing (17). Kallen's ideas served as a counterpoint to the contemporary melting pot theory made popular by English-born Jewish playwright Israel Zangwill. According to Steiner, in contrast to Kallen, Zangwill's narrow concept "promoted the abandonment of ethnic identity in the crucible of American Culture" (85). Kallen left the University of Wisconsin in 1918, and in 1919 he became a founding faculty member at the New School for Social Research in New York. Although his seminal ideas evolved, expanded, and occasionally waned over time, through his interaction with a cross section of public figures, including key Black intellectuals, social activists, and artists, Kallen remained a vocal champion of cultural pluralism through most of his lifetime, even up to his death at the age of ninety-two in 1974. He became a particularly active proponent after World War II, and Steiner asserts that in the late 1950s, Kallen adopted an even more generous version of pluralism than he had espoused forty years earlier. Kallen was also an early and staunch defender and prime mover of American Zionism until the 1920s. He even convinced Louis Brandeis that support of Zionism enhanced American patriotism and accusations of dual loyalties were unfounded aspersions. Michael C. Steiner is an eloquent writer who has mastered the relevant primary and secondary sources to weave an informative, detailed, and often engaging narrative. He does a fine job of demonstrating the centrality of the Midwest to Kallen's influential theory. Despite the relatively slim size of the volume, however, the book is often repetitive. For example, the countless number of times the word "expansive" is used becomes tiresome. Nevertheless, Steiner has provided an important new perspective on Kallen's life and work, one that opens a wider window in which to examine the factors that influenced the creation of an intellectual paradigm that has remained influential and relevant for over a century. Moreover, he reminds us of the underlying importance...

Donald Trump, White Evangelicals, and 2020: a Challenge for American Pluralism

The strong allegiance of white evangelicals to President Trump is one of the defining – and confounding – characteristics of this era of American politics. We propose that the orthodoxy of evangelicals is more concerned with preserving its identity and power than it is with adhering to a doctrine, and therefore will not be satisfied regardless of the outcome of the 2020 election.

A Hundred Acres of America: The Geography of Jewish American Literary History

A Hundred Acres of America: The Geography of Jewish American Literary History

Immigration and Politics in the 21st Century: The Rise of Nationalism Versus Pluralism in the United States

This paper examines the changing concept of pluralism in the United States, especially, in the aftermath of President Trump’s zeitgeist hard line immigration policy. Trump’s immigration agenda is forcefully manifested in ultra-nationalism tendencies including “trade war” (Economy, 2019), “economic populism” (Lenz and Gunter, 2017), “separation of young children from their parents at the border,” “claim of presidential powers to nullify the constitutional right to birthright citizenship” (Shapiro, 2019), “white identity politics” (Confessore, 2016), “racial resentment” (Harris, 2018), “racist nativist micro-aggressions” (Gomez and Huber, 2019), inciting racist and xenophobic rhetoric, such as “anti-Mexicanism and Islamophobia” (Huerta, 2017, p. 57) by the President in the push to advance his “Make America Great Again” and “America First” agendas. The meanness associated with Trump’s rhetoric evokes isolationism, anti-multiculturalism, intolerance, hate, and undermines America’s leadership role in the world. Bill Gates, cofounder of Microsoft Corporation, is not remiss: “America First worldview concerns me. It’s not that the United States shouldn’t look out for its people. The question is how best to do that. My view is that engaging with the world has proven over time to benefit everyone, including Americans, more than withdrawing does” (Gates and Gates, 2018). Using Trump’s efforts to end Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program as a case study, this paper will discuss the administration’s attempts to roll back American pluralism. In addition, the paper will discuss the political ascendency of Trump and its unfolding implications. Furthermore, the paper will discuss the ideals of America’s pluralism not only as the pillar of the American way, but also, as the important glue that binds and fosters American diversity, and boosts the U.S. economy. The paper will utilize nationalism theory framework of analysis to conceptualize and explain Trump’s brand of nationalism in contemporary global politics. The paper will add to the body of knowledge and literature on the subject of nationalism. The terms populism and nationalism will be used interchangeably. Keywords : immigration, nationalism, pluralism, DACA, economy, globalization, and Trump DOI : 10.7176/JLPG/99-06 Publication date :July 31st 2020

Midwestern Regionalism: Place, Time, and Perspective

Midwestern RegionalismPlace, Time, and Perspective Terry A. Barnhart (bio) New regional studies and histories—as Homer might well say—come and go like leaves in the forest. Responding to scholarly trends, midwestern regionalism, much like the glaciers that shaped the midwestern landscape, has advanced and retreated numerous times. Whether it was the "new regionalism" of the 1920s assessed in Carey McWilliams's The New Regionalism in American Literature (1930), Howard W. Odum and Harry Estill Moore's classic American Regionalism (1938), Merrill Jensen's Regionalism in America (1951), Charles Reagan Wilson's The New Regionalism: Essays and Commentaries (1998), or the current reawakening regarding midwestern history stemming from the numerous writings of Jon K. Lauck, regionalism in American history and culture has produced a rich literature notwithstanding periods of dormancy. As a concept and an approach to understanding American pluralism it has had no shortage of advocates and critics. Regionalism translates as American pluralism along with race, ethnicity, nationality, class, and gender—categories of historical analysis that are by no means divorced from regional studies—and reminds us that American regions preceded the creation of the nationstate, influenced its formation, and continue to shape its heterogeneity. The American South, New England, and the Southwest—where regional consciousness has produced a large literature—have received a disproportionate amount of attention. Comparatively speaking the Midwest is an understudied region, although it is becoming much less so today due to a revival of midwestern studies. A consistent theme within the historiography of the American Midwest is that the region has been largely overlooked in American history—if not [End Page 1] in an absolute sense at least in a relative one. Finding a New Midwestern History (2018) by Jon K. Lauck, Gleaves Whitney, and Joseph Hogan, editors, together with Lauck's The Lost Region (2013) are calls for a renewal of midwestern history—one that reclaims the primacy that historians once assigned it within the broader sweep of the national experience. Lauck laments the region's relative neglect both in the media and in more recent years by historians. David M. Fahey expresses a similar regret regarding scholarly trends and abandonments. Yet all is not a desert. Past neglect is partially mitigated by the works of Lauck, the meetings of Midwestern History Association, and the offerings of relatively recent journals: Middle West Review, Studies in Midwestern History, Midwestern Gothic, Old Northwest Review and The New Territory. State historical journals significantly add to that coverage, however sporadically, as they have done since their beginnings in the nineteenth century.1 Nor is it likely that the most recent resurgence will abate any time soon given the premium placed on localism, regionalism, and identity politics throughout the globe and not just in the United States. Midwestern regionalism will likely once again have periods of relative quiescence if the history of the subject is any indicator of future scholarly inclinations. As Andrew R.L. Cayton and Susan E. Gray observed in The American Midwest: Essays on Regional History (2001), global trends in regionalism and identity politics make any marginalization of midwestern history all the more "ahistorical" and myopic since the region "prefigured" many of the developments still afoot in American culture and cultures around the world. In equal measure with which the history of the Midwest has been comparatively understudied it has more recently been reaffi rmed. A compensatory movement to rediscover and revalue Midwestern history has been in full stride for some time now and has received further impetus with the appearance of Lauck et al. Finding a New Midwestern History. Scholars across many disciplines will continue to ask what parts of the Midwest are incontrovertible facts, what parts dubious myths, and what are the gray areas of half-truth lying between those extremes. Midwestern historians have oft en found it necessary and therapeutic to explain themselves to themselves as well as to "outlanders."2 A thread of continuity in the narrative of the Midwest is that it is the most characteristically American region. Odum and Moore observed in American Regionalism (1938) that the "unity of diversities"—ostensibly an oxymoron—explained midwestern cohesiveness. Yet however paradoxical [End Page 2] it is a conclusion arrived at...

A Prophetic Guide for a Perplexed World: Louis Finkelstein and the 1940 Conference on Science, Philosophy, and Religion

ABSTRACTThis article traces negotiations over the epistemic, ethical, and political authority of Judaism, Protestantism, Catholicism, and science in mid-twentieth-century America. Specifically, it examines how the president of the Jewish Theological Seminary, Rabbi Dr. Louis Finkelstein, led a diverse group of intellectual elites as they planned and convened the 1940 Conference on Science, Philosophy and Religion in Their Relation to the Democratic Way of Life (CSPR). Based on the conference's transcripts, proceedings, and papers, in addition to Finkelstein's writings from the period, this article shows how Finkelstein used his vision of the Jewish tradition as a model to form a pluralistic intellectual space that brought together the representatives of multiple religious traditions and modern science. To accredit the American way of life to Judaism, Finkelstein traced America's ethical values, democratic politics, and scientific genius back to the Hebrew Prophets through Rabbinic Judaism. In response to Finkelstein's historiography and the political and ideological challenges of World War II, scientific and religious experts negotiated their authority and debated how to mobilize their traditions in a quest for political stability. By analyzing the CSPR as a meeting of multiple discourses, this article reinstates science as a fundamental player in the story of American pluralism and demonstrates the way a non-Protestant tradition shaped the terms of an elite public's understanding of the “democratic way of life.”

Islam, Puritanism, and Secular Time

Abstract This article reconsiders the legacy of American Puritanism in the context of the current controversy around “radical Islam.” The rise of Salafi jihadism has emboldened those who maintain that Islam is incompatible with Western secularity. Liberal responses to this claim frequently appeal to the United States’ allegedly Puritan past, suggesting that the United States is particularly well placed to deal with both radical Islamism and anti-Islamic prejudice because of the ecumenical pluralism that emerged from the colonial crucible of competing denominations. I interrogate this claim by reading liberal and conservative statements about Muslims in the contemporary United States alongside the writings of Roger Williams, whom many consider to be the father of American pluralism. I argue that the modern rhetoric of religious diversity mirrors the eschatological structure of Williams’s tenet of toleration, wherein Muslims are offered only temporary acceptance. In each case, the pluralism of the present is set off against an anticipated cultural homogeneity.

Response: Postexceptionalist Puritanism: Rocking the Foundations

Response: Postexceptionalist Puritanism: Rocking the Foundations

The Ethnic Avant-Garde: Minority Cultures and World Revolution

The Ethnic Avant-Garde: Minority Cultures and World Revolution

The Joseph Smith Papers: Documents, Volume 3, February 1833–March 1834 ed. by Gerrit J. Dirkmaat, et al., and: The Joseph Smith Papers: Documents, Volume 4, April 1834–September 1835 ed. by Matthew C. Godfrey, et al.

Reviewed by: The Joseph Smith Papers: Documents, Volume 3, February 1833–March 1834 ed. by Gerrit J. Dirkmaat, et al., and: The Joseph Smith Papers: Documents, Volume 4, April 1834–September 1835 ed. by Matthew C. Godfrey, et al. Rodney Hessinger The Joseph Smith Papers: Documents, Volume 3, February 1833–March 1834. Edited by Gerrit J. Dirkmaat, Brent M. Rogers, Grant Underwood, Robert J. Woodford, and William G. Hartley. (Salt Lake City: The Church Historian’s Press, 2014. 627pp. Cloth $54.95, ISBN 13: 978-0-8014-5009-9.) The Joseph Smith Papers: Documents, Volume 4, April 1834–September 1835. Edited by Matthew C. Godfrey, Brenden W. Rensink, Alex D. Smith, Max H. Parkin, and Alexander L. Baugh. (Salt Lake City: The Church Historian’s Press, 2016. 667pp. Cloth $54.95, ISBN 13: 978-1-62972-174-3.) The next two installments of the Documents series of The Joseph Smith Papers maintain the high standard of previous volumes. The larger project, much of which is made easily accessible to students and instructors on its Web site (www.josephsmithpapers.org), will prove to be an invaluable resource for generations to come. It will particularly benefit scholars who are interested in religion, politics, gender, the frontier, and pluralism in the early American republic. These two particular volumes deeply contextualize documents produced by Smith and his LDS partners while they were laying a durable administrative and doctrinal foundation for the church. The Mormons were also installing a literal foundation for Kirtland Temple in Ohio, as well as planning the town of Zion in Missouri. This blueprint work consumed much of Smith’s time and energy and is fully documented here. Between 1833 and 1835, most Mormon adherents were gathered in Kirtland, Ohio, and in Jackson County, Missouri. Having assembled followers into religiously homogeneous communities, Smith worked to develop some of the distinctive features that would help to further separate (and aggravate) Mormons from their neighbors. The city of Zion was planned in Missouri as a spot where the devoted would gather to receive Christ during his Second Coming. In one of his Covenants received in Ohio, Smith would call on the community to tithe 10 percent of their earnings to the church to support the poor and other causes revealed by God (4:188–91). In these same years, a host [End Page 102] of new offices was designated within the church, such as the Seventy priesthood. There were important theological innovations too, such as Smith’s revelation that humankind had a premortal existence, being spiritually present with God at the time of creation (3:83–91). Forming into distinctive theocratic communities, the Mormons, who initially were not easily distinguished from other revivalist sects, charted a path that would make them a singular religion and people in the early American republic. These two volumes capture this break toward Mormon distinctiveness. They also document the literal and rhetorical violence suffered by Mormon communities on the frontier. Historians who wish to examine the limits of American pluralism will find rich material to explore. While many of these documents have appeared previously, especially in Smith’s History of the Church, there is much of new value in these volumes. Each document is presented with a carefully constructed introduction, highlighting the actors and settings for the text, an essay often longer than the document itself. In addition, the introductions and the documents are supplemented with extensive footnotes, leading the reader to other relevant documents and background material. The thoroughness of the enterprise can almost be daunting, but the editors worked hard to make the papers accessible. By providing time lines, maps, and charts, they make it easy for the reader to step back and appreciate the larger picture. In addition, they invite the reader to look over Smith’s shoulder by providing many images of the original documents and drawings. These volumes, as well as the Papers more generally, are essential acquisitions for academic libraries. Students and historians alike have been given a rich documentary mine to dig. [End Page 103] Rodney Hessinger John Carroll University Copyright © 2017 The Kent State University Press

The American Jewish Philanthropic Complex in the Age of Trump

The American Jewish Philanthropic Complex in the Age of Trump Lila Corwin Berman (bio) In the past, I have concluded a lecture about American Jewish philanthropy with a plea for a reinvigorated public: "Where are the people?" If listeners have stuck with me this far, through my explanations of tax-law reform in the late 1960s and of the emergence of new financial vehicles for holding and investing philanthropic capital, then they know just where I am going. Tax policy, investment and endowment practices, and financial language have empowered the philanthropic sector, and especially its biggest donors, to act with only the most perfunctory regard for the public. And yet, dollar for dollar, the state and the public subsidize American philanthropy through tax deductions and exemptions. So instead of feeling cowed by altruism, I tell my listeners, you should feel empowered as an owner of American philanthropy to demand transparency and speak out when you think it is not doing the right thing. Living today in a country that elected Donald Trump to its highest public office, I worry that my call for the public to take back some of the power it has granted to the philanthropic sector may be misguided and even dangerous. My pre-Trump understanding of the historical formation of the American public and philanthropy (and the Jewish subsector of each) may be inadequate in this new era of Trump. Below, I sketch the frameworks that have guided my research into Jewish philanthropy and explain how Trump's election has caused me to reassess them. Most important, I question whether the critical [End Page 193] apparatus I have embraced to understand philanthropic practices as reinforcing state-assisted inequality has a place in Trump's America, where the state could grow so large and all-powerful or shrink so far into nonexistence that we will long for the imperfections of the twentieth-century American state. Others may relate to my new habit of constantly marking things as pre-Trump or post-Trump. Such stark divisions of time are flawed heuristics. Still, I find it difficult to think about my own research any other way. Thus, even as I cannot avoid framing this essay around the turning point of Trump's election, I suggest we work to undermine such chronological neatness. In the end, we should not cede control over time—that is, over our fundamental narratives of ourselves—to Trump. ________ Pre-Trump, I had developed the following understanding of the historical formation of the American Jewish public and its political economy in relation to the American state: The American Jewish public takes its form from the "associational" realm of American political organization. Nineteenth-century religious disestablishment laws, passed state by state, played a fundamental role in defining associations as state-maintained structures to connect a diversity of collectives to the workings of the state. States crafted incorporation laws to regulate the shape of corporate, that is, associational, life. In addition to incorporation law, tax policies enabled states to discipline and encourage associationalism. For example, states offered religious groups property-tax exemptions in return for their adherence to state-mandated forms. These regulatory practices extended into multiple domains of American life, as benevolent societies, fraternal organizations, educational agencies, and others incorporated and benefited from property-tax exemptions in return for their service to the public good.1 A contract between the state and its many associations rests at the base of American pluralism and provides one of the foundations of American democracy. The practices of state-based associationalism have enabled our country to aspire to support a diversity of institutions and regulate them only in form and not in substance. Courts of law have relied upon such an understanding of the relationship between the state and its associations to defend freedom of conscience within institutions so long as they abide by the structures of the state. At the same time, the state's chosen method of exercising power in associational life through tax expenditures has calcified certain [End Page 194] patterns of inequality.2 Because states and eventually the federal government used taxation as its primary means of regulating associational life, the shortcomings of tax code became...

Regulation Theory and the Political Economy of the European Union

AbstractEuropean integration theory considers to what extent the EU can realize a telos where American pluralism is the template. Not without merits, but considering the financial and eurozone crises fatally, such perspectives elide power relations and attendant contradictions and irrationalities that are constitutive of transatlantic integration itself. Regulation theory, which synthesizes the reformist ethos of Europe's postwar statist tradition and Marxism, and which has produced a considerable body of analysis of the EU published at the margins of EU scholarship, offers a compelling alternative that potentially overcomes these shortcomings. This article critically assesses how regulation theory has interpreted the single market, financial liberalization and EMU as a suppression of alternatives to neoliberal post‐Fordism, or finance‐led accumulation, in Europe. It argues that understanding the EU's current conjuncture of eurozone crisis management requires a neo‐Gramscian extension of regulation theory, stressing transnational patterns of capitalist accumulation and power relations.

Book Review: Isaac Weiner: Religion Out Loud: Religious Sound, Public Space, and American Pluralism

Book Review: Isaac Weiner: Religion Out Loud: Religious Sound, Public Space, and American Pluralism

Religion Out Loud: Religious Sound, Public Space, and American Pluralism by Isaac Weiner (review)

Isaac Weiner, Religion Out Loud: Religious Sound, Public Space, and American Pluralism. New York: New York University Press, 2014. 264 pp.The opening chapter of Theodore Dreiser's 1925 novel, An American Tragedy, describes a small family proclaiming the (very Christian) word of God on a street corner of a large midwestern American city. Dreiser's rich prose hints, albeit indirectly, at the density of sound in the cityscape: throngs of people streaming on the sidewalks, lines of cars with clanging bells, towering buildings creating canyon-like spaces. Against this backdrop of the densely layered sounds-the noise-of urban public space, the family breaks out a portable pump organ and sings psalms and preaches from the Bible, struggling both to be heard against the din of the city and to be listened to amidst the of secular life that the city both represents and enables, even as their preaching adds to that noise.Like Dreiser, Isaac Weiner's fascinating book, Religion Out Loud: Religious Sound, Public Space, and American Pluralism, takes as its starting point that consists not simply of systems of substantive content, moral claims, and theological arguments (199), but rather is fundamentally constituted by the expressive practices that enact such systems, and a recognition that such practices involve, in most cases, acts of public sounding. Weiner uses this observation as an inroad to examining how Americans have historically negotiated religious differences in urban contexts since the early 1800s by detailing select disputes concerning religious sound in the public sphere that made their way through legal and legislative channels in various parts of the country at different points in time. In particular, Weiner focuses on instances in which people complained that religion was, simply, a source of unwanted noise. Putting words in the mouths of a hypothetical complainant, he asks, spirituality have to be so noisy? Does religion have to be so loud? (195). The answer, or course, is that not all religious sound is noisy per se, but that is subjectively ascribed from within a context of social relations and social difference. The history of complaints about religious in the US is, Weiner argues, one in which noise demarcated difference more generally, threats to a dominant social order that had to be carefully contained. Sensory values expressed social hierarchies, and cacophony signified social chaos. Noise marked the limit of what could be tolerated (5). Thus loud religion is not simply measured in terms of decibels (though that may be part of the ascription of noisiness), but across other, multiple dimensions such as intelligibility, location, and perceived temporal and spatial appropriateness. While Religion Out Loud provides a detailed analysis of several instances in which religious practice was contested on the basis of its noisiness, Weiner's ultimate questions concern the ways in which religious pluralism has been historically negotiated in the US, and he argues that sound, because of its potentially uncontainable nature, is a particularly insightful locus in which to examine the intricacies of those negotiations.Weiner relies heavily on the analysis of specific court cases in which the right to make religious sounds was challenged, as well as specific legislative instances such as the drafting of municipal ordinances. He argues that the US courts have routinely functioned to domesticate religious enthusiasm and restrain religious dissent and have thus served to encourage alternative forms of piety that can more readily be kept quiet (7). The courts, in other words, have participated in the establishment of constraints upon religious expression, and these constraints have largely taken the form of circumscribing religion's public presence, keeping it contained in ways that are consistent with liberal-Protestant and Post-Enlightenment ideas about 'good' religion, conceiving it as properly internalized, individualized, and intellectualized (196). …

Religion Out Loud: Religious Sound, Public Space, and American Pluralism

Journal Article Religion Out Loud: Religious Sound, Public Space, and American Pluralism Get access Isaac Weiner. (New York: New York University Press, 2014. xiv, 251 pp. Cloth, $79.00. Paper, $25.00.) Journal of American History, Volume 101, Issue 4, March 2015, Pages 1241–1242, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jav019 Published: 01 March 2015